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When it was announced some time ago that a Civilization game would come to Facebook I was skeptical, a Civilization game designed for a casual audience didn’t sound very appealing. The fact that Sid Meier was said to have an active role in designing the game piqued my interest, so when I read that it entered public beta I decided to try it out despite my aversion to all things connected to Facebook.

The login servers seem to be busy a lot at the moment, this is just one of the many technical problems of the game.

To summarize my first impression of the game, it only shares the name and some superficial similarities with the original Civilization games. If you expect a 4X game you will be disappointed. Currently it is also a completely broken mess, unplayable due to game-breaking bugs. I’m not talking about smaller bugs that are expected to occur in a beta, but serious, very frequent bugs that pretty much randomize which civilization wins the game. I haven’t played long enough to see how deep the strategy can go in the game, but at the moment any strategy is useless if the rewards for your efforts are randomly distributed to an opposing civilization.

Combat in the Witcher 2 is difficult. This is no Hack&Slay, blindly wading into a group of enemies and attacking them will result in a quick death. The difficulty is increased to frustrating levels by the tutorial, which doesn’t explain much and just drops you into difficult fights without telling you how to fight. I’ve summarized some basic combat tactics here that should make the initial fights less frustrating. I’m not assuming any investment in advanced talents, all the tactics here are valid for a low-level witcher.